FINLAND!

Our 5 days in Finland was really great. Helsinki was incredibly clean, organized and easy to navigate. The whole country has 5.3 million people, Hanoi has nearly 7 million. So needless to say, it was a pleasure. We spent one night in a cabin. We took an overnight train to the Arctic Circle, went fishing (no luck) and took the train back to Helsinki. After eating reindeer and walking around the parks we boarded an afternoon ferry to Tallinn, Estonia.

A market in Helsinki where we bought, dill, potatoes, tomatoes, carrots, garlic, and plums. We cooked these at our cabin in Porvoo an hour outside Helsinki.

Standing at the Arctic Circle a bit north of Rovaniemi, Finland.

Fishing in the Kemijoki River.

In Helsinki.

A buffet breakfast spot in Helsinki.

Our little cabin we stayed in in Porvoo.

St. Petersburg

Part of the outside of the Hermitage Museum.

The ceiling in the main staircase up to the 2nd floor.

One of the many rooms.

There were about 30 chandeliers in this one room.

One of many different wooden floors. The different colors are different types of wood.

Lisa standing under a green marble carved urn?

Another room in the palace.

Monet. In the Garden.

Is there money in St. Petersburg??? How about buying a Mercedes with gold paint?

Only in St. Petersburg!

Singer building (sewing machine headquarters)

St. Petersburg was pretty incredible. We arrived in Moscow at 1:55 pm after departing Beijing 5 and a half days before. The train arrived exactly on time as scheduled. We had some difficulty buying a ticket for a night train to St. Petersburg. There are several places to buy tickets, there are more than 2 train stations and, this is a big one, we don't speak, write or read Russian. So we went from line to line, building to building, one window to another before buying our 3rd class tickets to St. Petersburg leaving at 10:30 pm that night. We killed our time wandering around the train staions and mall before boarding our train. Interesting experience. Pretty packed with people in 3rd class but everyone was very quiet. Our "beds" were what appeared to be a shelf that Lisa slept on with 2 straps to keep her from falling out onto the aisle. My "bed" was created once a table between two chairs was flipped over and connected to the wall. I was to sleep in a space running in line with the direction of the train and it was exactly as wide as my shoulders, I measured. The length was shall we say, not enough.

But we arrived in St. Petersburg on a chilly, drizzly day at 6:30am. We found our way to our hostel and walked in at 7:30am. We were told that we couldn't check in until 1:00. So we wandered around in the cold until then. Much of the area we were in was closed and the place seemed abandoned.

Sleeping in bunks in a 14 bed room in a hostel was an experience. Most of the Germans, Brits, and Scottish 20 somethings didn't come back to the hostel to sleep until waaaay past midnight. They were ready to go out when we were going to bed. Geezers.

The highlight of our time in St. Petersburg was visiting the Hermitage Museum a.k.a. a museum in a palace from the early 1700s. INCREDIBLE. A place like this must be visited and although we'll include a few pictures of the inside, it is just too hard to describe. Totally over the top. The building was the winter palace used by Peter the Great and Catherine. Imagine having more money than you knew what to do with and designing a palace. Marble staircases, 40 foot tall solid granite columns. painted ceilings, gold leaf, intricate wood floors... Hopefully a few pictures will give you some idea.

After 3 nights in St. Petersburg we woke at 4:45am to walk to the train station (not the one we arrived at from Moscow--there is more than one train station in SP as it turns out) We boarded a brand new tilting train called the Allegro that goes over 125 mph from SP to Helsinki. The passport checks are done during the train ride. It was really nice. And entering Finland from 9 days in Russia was like a leap into the future in infrastructure, civil liberties, cleanliness, and smiles.

Lisa's favorite pictures from the Trans Mongolian

And we have so many more!

Day 5 on Trans-Siberian Train

One of the Russian cars I mention below.

Our morning coffee by the window.

June 12, 2011 ---rolling along between Yekaterinburg and Perm’

We have decided we could do this for a long time. We drink tea, we drink coffee, we stand and look out the open hallway window and breathe the fresh air zipping by. We take naps, we read, we research the next leg of our trip in our Lonely Planet Europe book; last night we watched an early James Bond—From Russia with Love. Overall it is very relaxing. We are shocked that we are still the only ones traveling in this entire car. It can hold 16 passengers, it is just us two. In fact judging from the numbers of passengers that get off at short stops, I’d say this train is about 10% full, there might be only15 passengers on the entire train, maybe 25. So this makes this whole experience very private and contemplative; it’s nice.
I managed to exchange some money yesterday in our café car which I used at a stop and although the lady in the kiosk was speaking Russian and I didn’t understand a single word, I was able to communicate what I wanted. It would have been difficult without arms. A pointing finger with an excited expression can communicate so much it turns out. I bought 3 large fried donut things filled with either potatoes or bits of meat and onions. I also bought a loaf of homemade bread. This supplemented our dinner of instant soups we brought along from Beijing.
Today’s scenery has been more expanses of birch trees, fields, spruce and fir trees punctuated by the occasional village. We are passing through the great boreal forests that circumnavigate the globe between about 45 and 65 degrees north latitude. These are the forests that have given rise to the extensive logging industries in Canada, southeast Alaska, Scandinavia, and of course Russia. Sometimes called the Taiga, it was cool to pass through a town yesterday with the name, Taiga. This afternoon has been cloudy with some drizzle. The temperature in the 50s to low 60s making some of these little villages appear lonely and cold—and this is the beginning of summer. I can’t imagine what it is like in the middle of winter. Every little wooden house has at least one chimney and I don’t think there is any insulation. Occasionally we see an old log cabin and brand new ones being built. Lisa says these villages look like a combination between 1850 and 1950. Time seems to have been lost, then found again and then frozen. It is Siberia after all, it is so cold time freezes. There are muddy roads that wind along the tracks and in and around the villages. People tend their potato gardens, people tend their goats munching away at the green grass.
Rarely do we see a car, if we do it is often a Russian made boxy vehicle with small wheels and a rack on its roof. If you asked a first grader to draw a car, this is what he/she would draw. The other popular car is a 2 door hatchback with bigger wheels and considerable ground clearance. Both cars look like they were designed in the 1950s or 60s, although they might be only 5 years old. (Don’t get confused with the chromed, finned American cars of the same time period. These simple communist cars are from the middle of the Soviet era) They are usually red, blue, black, silver or white. And not a metallic paint with a name like sea mist or midnight pearl, they are the colors of crayons in a box of 12.
It is only at the stations when the train stops that we get to observe people for any length of time. Smoking is popular and common. The edges of the tracks where the gravel meets the raised platform is littered with cigarette butts, thousands of them. They are swept off the edge, but they don’t go away. The choice of clothing is interesting to say the least. Bathing suits or men without shirts are popular on sunny days. I suppose after months of freezing temperatures and darkness when the opportunity arises to bear some skin to the sun, people bear. The clothing people do wear takes a while to grasp in terms of fashion. It would appear as if they went through a thrift shop and blindly picked things to wear. Athletic warm up suits are popular among the men and I have seen not one but two mesh shirts. So we’ve got farming methods from the 1750s, houses from the 1850s, cars from 1950s, smoking like it’s the 1960s and shirts from 1979. Communism collapsed here in 1991 but some things are just hard to shake I guess. For women, the attire is hard to describe. The older women do wear long skirts, shawls or sweaters and a scarf tied over their heads with the knot under their chins. A stereotypical round Russian lady I know but it’s true. Hair dye is common for all ages. For women under that age of 50 the only thing I can say about their attire is…random. Pink spandex tights, denim mini skirt, a long sleeved black shirt under a short white vest, on the feet, black lace up boots with heels circa 1650 or 1982.
We are crossing the Ural Mountains according to the map but we don’t really see any mountains, more like hills. This physical land formation marks the accepted boundary among geographers between Europe and Asia.

Day 4 on Trans-Siberian

June 11, 2011—9:30 am—just passed Krasnoyarsk, Russia.
After dinner last night of noodle soup, beet chips and almonds, we took showers. Our compartment shares a shower and sink with the room next door. The water pressure is not great but we were able to get clean which is a nice luxury while riding a train for several days. After that we watched The Way Back on our laptop, an appropriate movie given our location. After the movie, we made up our beds with the sets of clean and ironed sheets. It was 11:30 pm Beijing time and I slept like a rock. Our first night without border crossings to deal with.

It seems like we pretty much have the entire car to ourselves. There was a Russian lady who got off the train an hour ago and another who got on. But for the most part there is nobody walking up and down our car. The entire train it seems is only about a 1/3 full. Yesterday afternoon the ride was just as beautiful. Passing groves of birch and aspen our train crossed metal bridges spanning fast flowing rivers. The occasional little village made up of houses no larger than 600 square feet, each with its own garden. Everybody has a garden surrounded by a low wooden fence. The houses look tired and I can imagine them to be very cold in the long Siberian winter. People are not out gardening as a hobby, they probably don’t read the latest organic growing techniques from Martha Stewart’s magazine; they grow potatoes and onions out of necessity and tradition. Some people had lilacs in their little garden yards.
The scenery is still beautiful. The birches have branches with leaves that droop and dangle. The tall, pines with their orange bark are a nice contrast to the white birch trunks. Tall, thin spruce trees point upwards like arrows. On the ground, ferns and super green grass. The kind that is so excited to come up again after so many months of frozen dormancy. The flowers are still amazing. Lisa has spotted wild hot pink peonies, little yellow poppies, pink wild roses, yellow mustard flowers, purple larkspur, Queen Anne’s lace, little orange marigold looking flowers, purple salvia, tiny yellow lilies. The fresh smell of the air is something we can’t get enough of. Standing at the window and watching the scenery go by as the air fills our lungs is just fun!
Most of the time we are traveling through wild, natural areas like this. We are sometimes passed by other trains, mostly freight often carrying logs, lumber or rocks and dirt (ore?), new rails for future tracks or rust colored box cars with who knows what. With the exception of the engine these freight trains look like those of antique toy train sets from the early to mid 1900s. Although the electrified engines pulling them including the one now pulling our train look to be about 60 years old. The freight is a throwback in time. In contrast, the freight trains we passed last summer in Iowa and Nebraska mostly were hauling containers. Russia is cutting and moving trees, the U.S. is importing flat screen TVs bound for Best Buy packed in containers that were on a ship from China.
We stopped yesterday at a few stations for enough time to get off and walk around the platform and take a few photos. At every stop that lasts longer than a few minutes the rail workers in orange vests walk along the length of the train on both sides with a hammer with a long handle and small head. They inspect each set of bogies on every car by hitting them in three different places and listening for the sound it makes. They hit the cap over the hub which I have learned should sound hollow and they hit the wheel itself which should give off a nice high frequency ring. They determine the integrity of the wheels with a 5 second sound check, pretty slick.
We have no Russian money which has become a problem. One station had a dozen little kiosks selling all sorts of things people riding trains might want. We found a nice loaf of bread we wanted and tried to pay with a dollar. The stout woman looked, quickly waved her hand in a “no” gesture and laughed. I tried another kiosk, same reaction. I tried at the next station, similar reaction without the laugh. I guess there is no place to exchange it in these Siberian towns. I suppose it would be strange if someone got off a train in rural North Dakota and tried to buy something with Russian money. Would they accept it? Probably not. I’ll try to exchange some money in the café car where we had lunch yesterday—Fried salmon, potatoes, peas, a cucumber, tomato, onion and dill salad and an order of “pancakes” filled with raw salmon. It was all delicious.

Third Day of (now) Trans-Siberian Train

A train station in Russia when we can hop off the train for a quick walk.

The train station in Taiga, Russia.

Lake Baikal.

June 10, 2011—10:40 am Siberia, Russia
Leaving Mongolia last night was relatively easy, only had to fill out two customs forms. One when we entered and one when we left; they were identical. Once the customs and immigration officers left the train, we slowly made our way in the dark towards the Russian border area where our train stopped at around 10:45 pm. We laughed to ourselves about the hats these Mongolians wore that sat turned up in the front making them appear 7-8 inches taller than they were.
The next two hours were something out of a James Bond movie in the 1980s. The train was the only one stopped in a well lit stretch with gravel below us and dark trees just beyond a fence that was designed to be difficult if not impossible to climb. We waited there for about 25 minutes as Russian customs officers in uniforms and berets inspected under the train cars with flashlights. They opened compartments under the train looking for contraband or stowaways. We rolled on to the next stop, the immigration check point which also was dark and intimidating beyond our train that was under bright lights from tall posts on either side of us. Other than the immigration officers there was no sign of any other people or town. The train squeaked to a halt, it was late at night, dark and eerily quiet when they boarded. We had our door open and waited for our turn listening to the officers speaking Russian. We were seated, I on the lower bunk and Lisa in the chair at the table holding our passports and immigration papers we had just filled out. The 6 foot tall blonde, blue eyed, uniformed 23 year old walks to our door and asks for the passports, I hand them to him and without making a gesture, he says, with a Russian accent of course, “One at a time.” I gave him mine. After flipping through the pages he says, “Stand up and look at me.” I comply and he studies my face as his eyes shoot back and forth between the clean shaven photo in my passport from 2003 and my tired and unshaven face of 2011. Is this the same person? “Please stand outside the compartment.” I move outside. Lisa’s turn. “Liza?” She stands up and is scrutinized like I was. “Please stand outside the compartment.” When we are both outside our compartment, he motions for the 5’ 9”, bleach blond woman with a shot putter’s build to go in and search our area. She is wearing black pants, a dark long sleeved shirt, and some sort of utility vest, also black. There is no sense of humor in either of these two. She climbs up to the top bunk in her tight pants and tight black gloves to peer into our luggage storage area above the hallway. All good. He stuffs our passports in his leather case and the young man and his contraband searching beefcake go on to the next compartment and begin to question the French couple next to us.
We waited. About 20 minutes later a different immigration officer walked down the hall peeking in the cabins, a few minutes after that another officer walked by with a dog, presumably sniffing for things that shouldn’t be on the train. Ten minutes go by, we made our beds, brushed our teeth, the dog and man go by the other way. Another 20 minutes or so and a large dark haired lady with bright lipstick stops by our door and looking at a clipboard, she looks up at Lisa and asks, “Liza Gott-a-fri?” Lisa responds, “Yes.” She then looks at me, “Edvard…” I smile, “Yes.” Then she leaves. A few minutes go by, it is after midnight and we are lying down. A group of 4 different immigration officers walk down our hallway speaking to each other. The dog goes by again. Eventually, sometime close to 12:45 am our blue eyed, humorless Russian appears at our door. “Liza…Gott-a-fri,” he hands Lisa her passport. Looking at me, “Edvard,” he hands me mine. Standing nearly motionless with a slight half smirk and the first sign of any emotion, he clearly and slowly says, “Velcome to Russia.”

I am writing this, while facing backwards, at our little table with Lake Baikal to my left only about 30 feet from the train tracks. It is crystal clear and stretches north east as far as I can see. Some of the shoreline of the lake is as clear and blue as the Caribbean Sea. The deepest lake in the world that holds something like 1/3 of the world’s fresh water is a sight to behold. To my right out the other window are paper white birch trees, green ferns and grasses and snow capped mountains in the near background. Yellow and orange wild flowers, wooden houses with steep metal roofs, plenty of chimneys, stacks of firewood and wooden fences that surround and protect beautifully tilled soil for wonderful vegetable gardens. Clean, dry air, few people, clear icy cold streams and rivers that feed the lake from the snowmelt. We are moving along at about 52 degrees north latitude and heading northwest.